Update Route 53 dynamically
Route 53 is the DNS service on Amazon Web Services. It does everything from domain registration to the hosting and management of domain names.
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Hosting a website on Lambda Function URL
In the past, I did a lot of Perl programming and a lot of CGI code that still run on various websites around the world today. When I migrated my knowledge across to AWS and serverless infrastructure, I found myself having to develop code in a similar structure to what I did previously in Perl and PHP.
With this article, the goal is to demonstrate how you could dynamically generate HTML in a Lambda function, and use Lambda as a make-shift web server for some simple applications using Python.
The root account
The AWS Root account is an absolute god user for your AWS account. This account must be kept secure, and only used in absolute emergencies. For an account that is so sensitive and secure, I was quite surprised that it is integrated into almost everything that Amazon does.
Digital Ocean is (probably not) better than AWS
Earlier this week, while browsing through my Twitter feed, I saw a post where someone was saying that Digital Ocean was better than AWS. Having used both of them extensively, the post caught my attention, and after reading through the comments, it became very clear to me that there was a huge misunderstanding between the two services. Let's break it down.
Accessing your EC2 instances securely
Cloud-native applications are certainly the way to go to maximize your cloud investment, however, for many organizations, redeveloping their in-house applications to be cloud-native can be a daunting (and expensive) exercise. So in many cases, it makes sense to lift-and-shift the on-prem servers to the cloud to utilize at least some of the benefits of cloud infrastructure.
Having those servers in the cloud is one thing, how do you connect securely to them to perform your support tasks?
Authenticating with AWS Cognito from PHP
AWS Cognito is a service that handles user creation and authentication for your application, allowing you to focus on the key aspects of your application.
Privilege escalation risks in AWS
A privilege escalation risk is where a user account within a system has the ability to elevate their privileges to a higher level than what was originally intended. This can have disastrous consequences, particularly if you have an insider threat. This type of risk is not limited to insiders only. Any user account with the right permissions can result in unwanted elevated permissions.
The us-east-1 outage of 2021
December 7th 2021 saw an outage in the us-east-1 region of AWS. The outage had a significant impact, not just on AWS, but for many customers all around the world.
Hosting a static website on AWS
To try and keep my hosting costs down, I decided to redevelop AWSSecurity.info and publish it as a mkdocs site, instead of WordPress. This is allowing me to host the site on S3 with CloudFront, rather than keeping an EC2 instance active all the time.
In this post, I will share with you details of how I achieved this.
Things I don't like about AWS
Last Updated: 2024-06-09
Full disclaimer – I am an Amazon Web Services fanboy. I love their cloud offering and I proudly hold 3 AWS certifications. Through my day job, I am also getting exposed to Azure. Yes, I know – Azure is a swear word amongst Amazonians, but the reality is that many companies do dabble in multi-cloud strategies. Some cloud providers are better at some things than others, and some features are just nicer than others, so with that, I decided to start putting a list together of some of the cool (and not so cool) features I have spotted on both platforms.